The Burial

I've been told that my strength is admirable. That what I have had to go through is vicious and undeserving. That I am loved and cherished, and always will be. I've been told that I'm handling it well. You haven't shed a single tear, they say, as my pillowcase floods. I've been told that it was foreseeable, an evident destruction just waiting to happen, that my rose tinted glasses must have been blurred, or ineffective, that maybe the sun burnt my eyes and made me blind to what is right in front of me. I have been held, and kissed, told that I am okay, that everything will be okay. Yet, all I hear is silence. White noise, muffled voices, static - I listen to an echo chamber of internal frenzy, round and round and round the thoughts swirl. And somehow, I am still here, lightly breathing the midnight air. But the thing is, what they don't see, is that I flipped over the pillow to discard of my tears. I muffle cries in the dead of night, under covers, screaming through a whisper, why, why, why? My mind a constant loop of what ifs, and will it ever be okay? And I soothe myself with warm cups of coffee and cotton sheets. From morning I am considered strong, resilient, great, and by evening I have smashed my rose tinted glasses into tiny little pieces, my vision comes back to life, and I see, I see in every little detail, what is right in front of me. I see, through shallow teary eyes, a person who is tearing their entire life apart. I see his eyes looking back at mine, trying to find the similarities. Does she have my eyes, is her nose shaped like mine? His mind would flood with thoughts and feelings of warm. But I can see the fire behind the eyes, the evil, the disgraced, the putrid blue hues fading to grey. The carnivorous glare as his pupils contract from the burning sun that highlights the disgust I feel when looking at him. I cannot look at him anymore, but my memory will capture his stare, and in great detail, I will store the film reel of memories away in a cardboard box, tucked into a corner I am far too scared to reach into. The box will rot and decay, and the remnants of belongings will dust and die, and the shards of rose tinted glass will shimmer under the crack in the roof, where the sun will become her most fierce, and set ablaze the corner I could never step towards. And I will watch, with bright and curious eyes, the cardboard box filled with a lifetime of a little girls need and desire for a father, turn to ash as the flames die out. And within the fog of black smoke, two eyes will be staring back at me, and I will enter the corner I have locked away, and grab the arms of the little girl sitting there, crying, wailing and begging for love, and I will look into her green eyes, stroke her curly hair, and tell her that she is okay. She is loved. She is cherished - and that most of all, we will be okay.

And behind me, in every capture, will be my mother, watching her daughter kill the lifelong fantasy of questions she had for all those years, and she will see her daughter smile, really smile, for the first time in a long time, because her daughter is free of what her mother always knew, that no matter what, it would always, and will always, be just you and her. And as they both embrace, a silent acknowledgement is exchanged, of love and gratitude, because without her mother, the daughter may not have survived the death of what her father could have been, as his ashes evaporate into the night, it was almost as though it never did happen. And the little girl in the arms of the mothers daughter, grips tightly onto her hand, and they know then, past me, current me, and future me, will find solace in the knowing that a generation of arms wrap around each other, and the one thing they all have in common, is that they are in line of a long family history, of some of the strongest women to roam this earth.